Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (best ereader for academics .txt) 📕

belly. In my nostrils, I had the delicious blend of roasting lamb tinged with wood smoke from where Dehan was hunkered down, lighting the fire. I heard it crackle and spark, and then she came over, lifted my feet and sat under them, resting them down on her lap as she picked up her martini.

“Level with me, when did you first suspect Sean?”

“Day one.”

“Come on!”

“That was when the first alarm bells went off. He was too much, too devoted, too committed to his family, too devout in his religion and yet…” I shook my head. “He wasn’t really any of those things. What he was under that patriarchal exterior was a lazy narcissist who was not devoted to his family at all, but wanted his family devoted to him.

“Then I started to be more suspicious when we told them about Lenny. I never really bought Lenny as Celeste’s killer. The circumstantial evidence against him was strong, but it all pointed to the affair, not to his killing her, and the disposal of the body pointed firmly to an amateur, not a pro like Lenny. And when we gave Sean and Samuel the news, Sean stated categorically that Lenny did not kill his Celeste. Samuel was shocked, incensed, outraged, furious, but Sean simply repeated over and over that Lenny had not killed her. He didn’t say he couldn’t have, he said he didn’t. He was categorical. That told me that he knew who had killed her.

“His physical condition seemed to rule him out, but it was always in the back of my mind that it could be psychosomatic, or simply that he was a lazy bastard who felt sorry for himself and wanted the world waiting on him.

“Then, when Samuel wanted me to cleanse Helen’s soul and rid her of Celeste’s evil, it struck me very forcefully that he could not do it himself. He was incapable. He wanted me to take the responsibility for the killing. That was not congruent with his having killed Celeste with his own bare hands.

“And the clincher was when I tried to drag him out of the bed and I saw how damned big and strong he was. He was not the frail old man he liked to pretend to be. He was an ox, at least as strong as his son, and he fit Chad’s description just as well or better.

“So I asked Father Arundel how long he had been bedridden—we had assumed for some reason that it had been for a long time—but it had only been since his daughter’s death. So at the time of her death, he was just as able-bodied as anybody else, and he had just as much motive, or more. So I called Geoff Blackstone and asked him to ask his wife what Reynolds’ first name was. She came back straight away, not Sam, but Sean. Remember, we told Geoff it was Sam Reynolds. He agreed—it’s an easy mistake to make. But his wife was the one with the excellent memory, and she remembered it was Sean, not Sam. So I asked them to come over to the hospital to identify him.”

She sat gazing at the fire, nodding slowly with her bottom lip stuck out. “It never crossed my mind.”

“I won’t say he was my number one suspect, but I just had this constant nagging feeling, all the other suspects just didn’t quite fit.”

We sat in comfortable, companionable silence for a while, sipping our drinks and listening to the fire crackle and occasionally spit. Dehan’s gaze was lost in the flames, with the orange light tinting her skin. After a while, she said, “Stone, I don’t want kids.” She looked at me and I frowned. “I’m focused on my career. But, you know, if we did, eventually, one day, decide to have kids, and build that extension, what do you think it would be, a boy or a girl?”

“I really don’t mind.”

“But what do you think?”

“Well, it might be a boy, or it might be a girl.”

“If it was a boy, what would we call him?”

“I always liked Thorvald, or maybe Bullvine…”

“Be serious…”

“Perhaps Ragnar…”

“Stone!”

BOOK 14

TRICK OR TREAT

ONE

I was looking through the window at the ash-gray sky. The naked plane trees looked cold, and the occasional, drifting flakes of sleet made them look colder. The search for cold cases on a day like this seemed almost an unwarranted excess. Desultory cars, their headlamps switched on despite being only eleven AM, sighed on the wet blacktop. People, muffled like Eskimos, leaned forward as they walked, with their hands deep in their pockets.

It was December. It was December with a vengeance.

Dehan was not looking out the window. She was chewing the butt end of a pencil and frowning at the insides of an old manila file.

“This case,” she said without looking up, “was twelve years old last Halloween. We should have a look at it.”

I examined the content of my mug and found there was nothing. It was empty but for the dregs. “Why, because it just had its birthday?”

“Cosmic cycles.” She looked up, ignoring my bitter humor, and frowned a little harder. “Cosmic cycles,” she said again. “Twelve months in the year, twelve signs in the zodiac… And also it seems insoluble. Not locked-room insoluble—that’s always a hidden hole in the wall—but a genuine puzzle.”

I reached out my hand and she tossed over the file. As I leafed through it, she started to recite.

“Sue Benedict, twenty-four, died on Halloween, three days before her twenty-fifth birthday. Sucks, huh?”

“Born in November,” I said, scanning the ME’s report. “All the best people are.”

“Yeah, right. So, her body was found in the bedroom, on the bed, raped, strangled and stabbed.”

“How do we know she was raped and not just killed post-coitus?”

“Abrasions on her inner thighs